Songs for boys are quirky, hiccupping and driving. Songs for girls are swirly, gossamer and spinning.

Songs for boys are better. Get over it.

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Rejoice in the fact that many of the songs for girls have cool guitar riffs, too. Guitar riffs pinched out in clawlike fashion, or down-strummed with naked fingers like Lightnin’ Hopkins playing the clawhammer banjo. Dig that news, Lightnin’ on the five-wire. Not exactly the image folks had in 1977 as they scooped up bajillions of “Rumours,” but it’s right there, in the grooves.

Lindsey Buckingham is the mind behind the Big Machine. His tall, famously leather-testicled drummer pal so much as said so at the Knickerbocker Arena last week, citing the younger man as mentor in as hushed a tone as an old Englishman can muster in a barn like the Pepsi Arena.

Truth. Buckingham is an alchemist, fusing nickel-plated steel, raw flesh and high wattage into a spare, fully tricked-out blues-meets-the-future style that shakes hands with The Big Machine’s history while still pushing it forward even these many years on.

The girl singer did her twirling am-I-on-MTV? thing at The Times Union Center. Sometimes it clicked, sometimes it clowned. But it always stood in the shadow of the boy songs.

“Tusk” is as gloriously stupid, brilliant and whacked as ever. It felt like a fuck you then, it feels like one now. In its heyday, The Big Machine was that rare convergence of commerce and art, and Buckingham felt like an interloper, a crazed, coked-up kid let loose in the hallways of the record biz. The Big Machine isn’t rare or even relevant anymore. But Buckingham is.

I find this review puzzling. I’m a girl, so that means I like certain Fleetwood Mac songs, or at least they’re written for me? But those songs are the lesser in the Fleetwood Mac oeuvre, which means my taste is inferior to your taste as a male. OK, I guess I get your point now.

Dude. (or dudette…whoever you are) Those songs aren’t gender specific. They’re written BY the boy or the girl but they’re for everyone. Unless I’m missing what you’re trying to say which is utterly possible because huh? I was at the Albany show and it was amazing. That said I love Lindsey Buckingham with a passion and it seems you do too so we’re cool.